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About Brandon West

As a Developer Evangelist for SendGrid, Brandon's focus is on empowering developers to build things, gathering feedback for new features and improvements, and fostering a cooperative developer community for anything that needs email integration.

Articles Posted by Brandon

Everybody, especially developers, loves working on documentation. They understand the importance of docs and its impact on customer adoption and customer experience, and they always consider docs when planning and releasing code. Wait, why are you laughing? Many companies have some kind of trouble with documentation. Lots of common problems make docs difficult to wrangle; information gets out of date or lacks completeness, the content is poorly organized or inconsistent, readers can’t find what they’re looking for, and code samples might be broken. If you walk through most engineering departments and ask for volunteers to help update docs, you’ll be…

24 months. It doesn’t seem to add up; “Developer Evangelist” still seems like the job I just started. I guess after writing code for a third of my life, that’s true. Learning and doing new things keeps me busy enough that I haven’t paid much attention to time sneaking past me. You could say that a lot has happened in those two years and nobody would call you a liar. SendGrid has raised more money, quintupled the number of employees, hit a couple bumps in the road along the way and continued a rapid pace of growth. When they offered…

When we last talked about learning to code I recommended learning program design before jumping into choosing a program language and writing code. The hardest thing about learning new tech is getting the conceptual framework. My question may be simple, but I don’t know how to ask. — Sarah Allen (@ultrasaurus) July 4, 2013 Sarah Allen is speaking about complex systems in general, but her tweet gets right to the heart of why it’s important to learn flow control structures, simple data modeling, and program design if you want to be a developer: these tools give you the conceptual framework…

Earlier this year we added a few beta statistical reports that show you the location, device and browser information, and ISPs of the recipients that click and open the emails you send. We have been working hard on improving these reports and integrating them more fully with the rest of our offerings. You can now retrieve these statistics via our Web API so you can crunch the numbers as you see fit or display them in your application’s dashboard. Head over to the Advanced Stats API documentation for more details and example calls. Happy coding! Related PostsSimulating Pokemon with SendGrid (and…

Good news, everyone! We’ve open sourced an officially supported Perl library for SendGrid. We have used this library internally for some time and decided to release it for the community to use and improve. The readme on github has more information on how to get things going, but the code for sending a simple email and using some SendGrid features looks like this: Packaging this library and getting the tests to run was fun since I had never touched Perl before. There is tons of good material out there regarding Perl, as you would expect given its history and…

Evangelists arrive at airport gates with just enough time to board. They have stockpiles of frequent flyer miles and memberships in a variety of hotel loyalty programs. They know exactly how to pack their bag depending on where they’re heading and for how long. I asked a few fellow road warriors what ends up in their travel kits when they prepare to head out. The most common items are a supplemental battery pack like a Mophie Juice Pack or Zagg Sparq for those moments when your phone is at 5% and you’re trying to map your way back to the…

Today SendGrid is excited to announce our new and improved documentation! Some of the highlights of the new system are: Quicker load times Improved navigation and organization More relevant search results Increased legibility Cleaner presentation of code samples Ability to toggle between JSON and XML examples The new system will allow us to collaborate on updates and changes much more quickly, and we hope that the changes will allow developers to find what they need quicker than before. We’d love to hear your feedback on how you like the changes or what we can do to make things better, so…